The NFL’s on-field struggles over the first two weeks of the 2017 season were well documented. Week 1 had the fewest close games for an opening week since 1973 and the most low-scoring blowouts of any week since 2009. Weeks 1 and 2 combined for the lowest average point totals through two weeks since 2010 and the highest average margin of victory through two weeks since 2005. If you have a strange dislike of touchdowns and close games, 2017 was the season for you.

Then Week 3 came along and restored our faith in spending Sundays indoors watching football on TV. Sparked by a fantastic 49ers-Rams game last Thursday night – the highest-scoring Thursday Night Football game since the program’s debut in 2006 – Week 3 was everything that Weeks 1 and 2 were not.

Seven of Week 3’s 16 games had a combined point total of more than 50 points and a margin of victory of fewer than seven points – in effect high-scoring close games – the most such games in NFL history. Only one other week – Week 15 of 2004 – had ever had six such games. (Weeks 1 and 2 of 2017, I should note, had zero of these games, the first time that had happened in back-to-back weeks since 2005.) By this metric, Week 3 had more action than all 1,396 weeks of regular-season pro football that came before it.

There's no single way to define "high-scoring close game" – but you get the idea

To be completely fair, the NFL expanded to 32 teams in 2002, allowing for up to 16 games in non-bye weeks, which is what we had in Week 3. And the league has generally grown its number of teams and weekly games over time, so some uptick in “high-scoring thrillers” is only natural. In order to account for this, I calculated the same metric as a percentage of games played in each week dating back to 1922.

Even then, Week 3 of 2017 gave NFL fans the second-highest percentage of high-scoring close games in a week in history (43.8%). The only week that surpasses it was Week 2 of 1964, when five of the AFL and NFL’s combined ten games (50.0%) had more than 50 total points and margins of victory of less than seven.

Sunday on NFL RedZone, 4:12pm to 4:27pm ET

Sunday’s drama peaked shortly after 4pm ET, when fans watching NFL RedZone were treated to a down-to-the-wire, multi-screen dance between the Steelers and Bears, Texans and Patriots, Falcons and Lions, and Giants and Eagles. At 4:12pm, the Steelers and Bears went to overtime. A minute later, Tom Brady capped a 2-minute, 75-yard game-winning Patriots drive with a touchdown pass to wide receiver Brandin Cooks.

Two minutes after that, the Eagles tied the Giants with 51 seconds to go. At 4:18pm, Bears’ running back Tarik Cohen appeared to have won the game with a 73-yard touchdown run on the second play of overtime, but had stepped out of bounds at the Steelers 38-yard line. At 4:20pm, Lions’ wide receiver Golden Tate appeared to have won that game on a 1-yard touchdown pass from Matthew Stafford.

One minute later, the Texans failed to convert a 54-yard Hail Mary, ending Texans-Patriots. A minute after that, Bears’ running back Jordan Howard really did end the Steelers-Bears game with a 19-yard touchdown run. At 4:24pm, Golden Tate’s game-winning touchdown was reversed, making the Falcons winners in Detroit. And at 4:27pm, the Eagles’ Jake Elliott kicked a 61-yard field goal – 7th-longest in NFL history – to beat the Giants on the last play of the game (after 24 fourth-quarter points by New York).

All of that happened in a 15-minute span on Sunday afternoon (and the Browns-Colts game got sneaky good, too), providing a fitting – and unprecedented – conclusion to what NFL RedZone host Scott Hanson commonly refers to as “the golden hour of sports television.” Here’s how Hanson described it:

“Ladies and gentlemen, that is the end of the early window of games – in Week 3 – two-thousand-and-seventeen – on NFL RedZone. Thrilling – dramatic – controversial – exhilarating finishes across the National Football League. Just when you think, oh, they’re low-scoring games, uncompetitive games, and controversy stirred up in, well, the corridors of power let’s say, pro football delivers a day – like – this.”

Looking Back at Week 3

For all of that real-life excitement, Week 3 was relatively unremarkable on the Coin vs. Machine front. Lady Luck (the coin) went 10-6 against the spread, bouncing back from a 5-11 performance the week before and outperforming all three of the prediction models for its first weekly win of the year. Sagarin’s “Ratings” method trailed FiveThirtyEight and RP-Excel by three wins, and is now a few back year-to-date.

The machines lost their lone unanimous three-way selection – Tampa Bay (-1.0 or 0.0) at Minnesota – knocking those picks down to 9-6 against the spread on the season (60.0%). The machines went 0-0 on Tier I picks (4-1 YTD), 4-4 on Tier II picks (9-8 YTD), 1-0 on Tier III picks (4-3 YTD), 3-2 on Tier IV picks (5-2 YTD), and 1-1 on Tier V toss-ups (4-5 YTD). (Reminder that these numbers exclude two Week 1 games.)

Week 3 underdogs went 12-4 against the spread, and the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective study I referenced last week would have won one (Bengals) and lost three (Rams, Broncos, Dolphins). (The study observed that from 1985 to 2015, teams with two home games in the first two weeks covered 60.4% o the time in Week 3, while teams with two away games covered only 34.9% of Week 3 games.)

The Tier V toss-ups are Washington (+7.0) at Kansas City and Miami (+3.0) hosting New Orleans. The line on the Washington-Kansas City game is so tight that at 6.5 the machine prefers the Chiefs by a hair.